1. Technical Field
Aspects of the invention relate to generating text in a handheld electronic device and to expediting the process, such as for example, where the handheld electronic device receives text from sources external to the device.
2. Background Information
Generating text in a handheld electronic device examples of which include, for instance, personal data assistants (PDA's), handheld computers, two-way pagers, cellular telephones, text messaging devices, and the like, has become a complex process. This is due at least partially to the trend to make these handheld electronic devices smaller and lighter in weight. A limitation in making them smaller has been the physical size of keyboard if the keys are to be actuated directly by human fingers. Generally, there have been two approaches to solving this problem. One is to adapt the ten digit keypad indigenous to mobile phones for text input. This requires each key to support input of multiple characters. The second approach seeks to shrink the traditional full keyboard, such as the “qwerty” keyboard by doubling up characters to reduce the number of keys. In both cases, the input generated by actuation of a key representing multiple characters is ambiguous. Various schemes have been devised to interpret inputs from these multi-character keys. Some schemes require actuation of the key a specific number of times to identify the desired character. Others use software to progressively narrow the possible combinations of letters that can be intended by a specified sequence of key strokes. This latter approach uses multiple lists that can contain, for instance, generic words, application specific words, learned words and the like.
An object of aspects of the invention is to facilitate generating text in a handheld electronic device. In another sense, an object is to assist the generation of text by processes that utilize lists of words, ideograms and the like by gathering new language objects from sources of text external to the handheld electronic device.